Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Spread of Socialist Realism: Soviet and Chinese Developments

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature

  • 732 Accesses

Abstract

The authors explore how the ‘truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development’—to quote the definition of socialist realism in the bylaws of the 1934 First Soviet Writers’ Congress—was used and modified in the Soviet Union and later adapted by writers in the People’s Republic of China. By using a number of texts by Semyon Babaevsky, Vasily Azhaev, Zhao Shuli, Guangbin Luo and Yiyan Yang, as well as Chinese translation and reading of Soviet socialist realist texts such as Nikolai Ostrovsky’s Kak zakalyalas’ stal’ (How the Steel Was Tempered, 1932–34), the chapter analyses issues of cultural import and export, internationalism, national development and the influence of the Cold War context on cultural production in both countries.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 189.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 249.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Hammond, ‘From Rhetoric to Rollback: Introductory Thoughts on Cold War Writing’, in Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 1.

  2. 2.

    I.K. Luppol, M.M. Rozental’ and S.M. Tret’iakov, Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), p. 666 (Lahusen’s translation).

  3. 3.

    See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 101–5.

  4. 4.

    Maxim Gorky, Mother, trans. by Isidore Schneider (1906; New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1911), p. 16.

  5. 5.

    See Thomas Lahusen, ‘Cement (Fedor Gladkov, 1925)’, in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 476–82. For the use of ‘left-wing’ as a pejorative, see V. Lenin, ‘“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder’, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ (accessed 10 May 2019).

  6. 6.

    The Sixteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), held in Moscow from 26 June to 13 July 1930, insisted on ‘the broad development of the cultures—national in form and socialist in content—of the peoples of the U.S.S.R.’ (J.V. Stalin, ‘Reply to the Discussion on the Political Report of the Central Committee to the Sixteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.)’, 2 July 1930, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/07/02.htm (accessed 30 March 2019)).

  7. 7.

    The concept of ‘national literatures’ or ‘literature of the national republics’ was already used during the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934 (see Luppol, Rozental’ and Tret’iakov, Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, p. 290, Lahusen’s translation).

  8. 8.

    Quoted in Antoine Baudin and Leonid Heller, Le réalisme socialiste soviétique de la période jdanovienne (1947–1953). Vol. 2: Usages à l’intérieur, image à exporter (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 19 (Lahusen’s translation).

  9. 9.

    Luppol, Rozental’ and Tret’iakov, Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, p. 374 (Lahusen’s translation).

  10. 10.

    Ibid., p. 374 (Lahusen’s translation).

  11. 11.

    Marcel Cornis-Pope, ‘An Anxious Triangulation: Cold War, Nationalism and Regional Resistance in East-Central European Literatures’, in Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature, p. 162.

  12. 12.

    Plamen Doynov, ‘The Sovietization of Bulgarian Literature and the “Bulgarization” of Socialist Realism’, Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 10: 4 (2015), pp. 339, 335, 335, 339, 339.

  13. 13.

    Quoted in Hartmut Pätzke, ‘Von “Auftragskunst” bis “Zentrum für Kunstausstellungen”: Lexikon zur Kunst und Kunstpolitik in der DDR’, in Eugen Blume and Roland März, eds, Kunst in der DDR. Eine Retrospektive der Nationalgalerie (Berlin: Neue Nationalgalerie, 2003), p. 326.

  14. 14.

    Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 253.

  15. 15.

    Anon, ‘Sumbur vmesto muzyki. Ob opere “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda”’, Pravda, 28 January 1936, p. 3. For an in-depth treatment of the event, its context and consequences, see Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki: Stalinskaia kul’turnaia revoliutsiia, 1936–1938 (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia kniga, 1997), pp. 12–16.

  16. 16.

    Edwin Seaver, ‘Socialist Realism’, The New Masses, 22 October 1935, pp. 23, 24.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., pp. 23, 24.

  18. 18.

    See, for example, Carlo Cappola’s Urdu Poetry, 1935–1970: The Progressive Episode (2017) and Alan Wald’s American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (2012).

  19. 19.

    Andrei Zhdanov, ‘On the Errors of the Soviet Literary Journals, ZVEZDA and LENINGRAD. August 20, 1946’, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/zhdanov/lit-music-philosophy.htm (accessed 30 March 2019).

  20. 20.

    See Baudin and Heller, Le réalisme socialiste soviétique, pp. 374–5.

  21. 21.

    See N. Lezhnev, ‘Za chistotu iazyka: Novaia redaktsii “Podniatoi tseliny”’, Zvezda, 6 (1953), pp. 156–70. A cursory comparison of three editions of the novel—Goslitizdat (1935), Goslitizdat (1951) and Sovremennik (1976)—shows that Sholokhov reintroduced most of what had been deleted or changed after the end of the Zhdanov era.

  22. 22.

    Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), ‘Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) Ob opere “Velikaia Druzhba” V.Muradelli’, Pravda, 11 February 1948, p. 1.

  23. 23.

    Konstantin Azadovskii and Boris Egorov, ‘From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism: Stalin and the Impact of the “Anti-Cosmopolitan” Campaigns on Soviet Culture’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 4: 1 (2002), p. 70.

  24. 24.

    See ibid., pp. 68, 78, 77. For a more recent publication on the ‘anti-cosmopolitan campaign’ and the ‘doctor’s plot’, see David Brandenberger, ‘Stalin’s Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Antisemitism and the Doctor’s Plot’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 6: 1 (2005), pp. 187–204.

  25. 25.

    Clark, ‘“Wait for Me and I Shall Return”: The Early Thaw as a Reprise of Late Thirties Culture?’, in Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds, The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 92.

  26. 26.

    Anna Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1: 1 (2000), p. 119.

  27. 27.

    Babaevskii, Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy (Moscow: Izd. TsK VLKSM, 1947), I, 6, 6, 19 (Lahusen’s translation throughout).

  28. 28.

    Ibid., I, 9.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., I, 37.

  30. 30.

    See ibid., I, 135. For a detailed analysis of the novel, see Thomas Lahusen, ‘L’homme nouveau, la femme nouvelle et le héros positif, ou de la sémiotique des sexes dans le réalisme socialiste’, Revue des études slaves, 60: 4 (1988), pp. 839–54.

  31. 31.

    Engels, ‘Engels to Margaret Harkness, April 1888’, in Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1953), p. 479.

  32. 32.

    Babaevskii, Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy, I, 99.

  33. 33.

    Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 39. These words are by Mitia Promyslov in Vasily Azhaev’s Vagon (The Boxcar), a novel published posthumously in 1988 that relates the deportation of a young worker to the labour camp Svobodnyi and his subsequent activity as a ‘free labourer’ in the far eastern labour camp system. The novel is the direct literary translation of Azhaev’s own experience.

  34. 34.

    See Victor Saprykov’s Peaceful Coexistence (1979).

  35. 35.

    Even Holden Caulfield appeared to challenge Pavel: see Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: A History of Western Culture in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 105, 146.

  36. 36.

    Quoted in Alexei Zhelokhovtsev, ‘Mayakovsky’s Poetry in China’, Soviet Literature, 6 (1983), p. 165; and in Edward Tyerman, The Search for an Internationalist Aesthetics: Soviet Images of China, 1920–1935 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2014), p. 60.

  37. 37.

    Bagrov, ‘Neizvestnyi “Lenfil’m”: Goluboi express’, TVKultura, https://tvkultura.ru/anons/show/episode_id/1817874/brand_id/62939/ (accessed 26 October 2018).

  38. 38.

    See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 51.

  39. 39.

    Quoted in Qu Qiubai, ‘E xiang ji cheng’, in Xiao Feng, ed, Qu Qiubai zuopin jingbian (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2000), p. 193 (McGuire’s translation).

  40. 40.

    See Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-yu Li’s edited China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (2010), Austin Jersild’s The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (2014) and Elizabeth McGuire’s Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (2017).

  41. 41.

    See Peng Shuzhi, Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang, Memoires de Peng Shuzhi: l’envol du communisme en Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), pp. 239–40.

  42. 42.

    Wang Meng—a novelist, Russophile and one-time Minister of Culture—is particularly eloquent about this in Sulian ji (Memorial to the Soviet Union, 2006).

  43. 43.

    See Mark Gamsa’s The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (2010).

  44. 44.

    See Yan Li, China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 147–52.

  45. 45.

    See Donghui He, ‘Coming of Age in the Brave New World: The Changing Reception of the Soviet Novel, How the Steel was Tempered, in the People’s Republic of China’, in Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-yu Li, eds, China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), pp. 403–6; and Miin-ling Yu, ‘A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, Comes to China’, Russian History, 29: 2–4 (2002), pp. 329–55.

  46. 46.

    See David E. Apter, ‘Yan’an and the Narrative Reconstruction of Reality’, Daedalus, 122: 2 (1993), pp. 215–17.

  47. 47.

    One of the most critical voices was that of Ding Ling: see Yi-Tsi Mei Feuerwerker, ‘In Quest of the Writer Ding Ling’, Feminist Studies, 10: 1 (1984), pp. 73–5.

  48. 48.

    Zhou Yang’s remarks are translated in Kyna Rubin, ‘Writers’ Discontent and Party Response in Yan’an before “Wild Lily”: The Manchurian Writers and Zhou Yang’, Modern Chinese Literature, 1: 1 (1984), pp. 79–102.

  49. 49.

    See Wang Zhengming, Xiao San zhuan (Chengdu: Sichuan wen yi chubanshe, 1992), pp. 290–311.

  50. 50.

    See Ying Du, ‘Shanghaiing the Press Gang: The Maoist Regimentation of the Shanghai Popular Publishing Industry in the Early PRC (1949–1956)’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 26: 2 (2014), pp. 89–141.

  51. 51.

    See Chen Jianhua, Er shi shiji Zhong E wenxue guanxi (Beijing: Gao deng jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), p. 159; and Nicolai Volland, ‘Translating the Socialist State: Cultural Exchange, National Identity, and the Socialist World in the Early PRC’, Twentieth-Century China, 33: 2 (2007), p. 66.

  52. 52.

    See Elizaveta Kishkina, Iz Rossii v Kitai: Put’ dlinoiu v sto let (Moscow: Izdatel’skii proekt, 2014), p. 338.

  53. 53.

    See Yan, China’s Soviet Dream, pp. 144, 150.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., pp. 148–9; Wang Meng, Wang Meng zi zhuan: Ban sheng duo shi (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2006), I, 90.

  55. 55.

    This factor was also true for film and music: see Minling Yu, ‘Cong gao ge dao di chang: Sulian qunyuan gequ zai Zhongguo’, Zhongyang yanjiu yuan jindai shi yanjiu suo jikan, 53 (2006), pp. 149–91; and Tina Mai Chen, ‘Film and Gender in Sino-Soviet Cultural Exchange, 1949–1969’, in Bernstein and Li, eds, China Learns from the Soviet Union, pp. 425–31.

  56. 56.

    See Rudolf Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (1992).

  57. 57.

    See Adrienne Montani, ‘Zhao Shuli and Socialist Realism’, Journal of South Asian Literature, 27: 2 (1992), pp. 41–7.

  58. 58.

    See Xu Qingquan’s Mingjia shuzha yu wentan fengyun (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2009).

  59. 59.

    Zhao, San Li Wan, new edn (1955; Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005), p. 137.

  60. 60.

    See Donald Holock and Shu-ying Tsau Holock, ‘Not Marxism in Words: Chinese Proletarian Fiction and Socialist Realism’, Journal of South Asian Literature, 27: 2 (1992), pp. 18–22.

  61. 61.

    See Montani, ‘Zhao Shuli’, p. 58.

  62. 62.

    Zhao, San Li Wan, p. 89.

  63. 63.

    For a general description of this effort and its results, see Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist and Literary Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966 (2010).

  64. 64.

    Roberts and Li, ‘Introduction’, to Roberts and Li, eds, The Making and Remaking of China’s ‘Red Classics’: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), pp. ix–xi. The eight books included six civil war novels and two about collectivisation, with industrialisation, not surprisingly, more or less absent.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., p. ix.

  66. 66.

    Like other socialist realist texts, Red Crag underwent numerous editorial changes over many years. According to Li Li, by the 1980s it had been published in twenty different editions and had sold ten million copies (see Li, ‘How to Tell a Story of Imprisonment: Ideology, Truth, and Melodramatic Body in the Making of Red Crag’, in Roberts and Li, eds, Making and Remaking, p. 50).

  67. 67.

    Frederik Wakeman has portrayed Dai Li as the puppet of Miles: see Wakeman, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (2003).

  68. 68.

    See Shen Yu, ‘SACO in History and Histories: Politics and Memory’, The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 5: 1 (1996), pp. 37–55.

  69. 69.

    See ibid., pp. 37–55.

  70. 70.

    See Li, ‘How to Tell’, p. 47.

  71. 71.

    See ibid., pp. 46–50.

  72. 72.

    Lo and Yang, Red Crag, trans. by anon (1961; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), p. 35.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., p. 75.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., p. 51.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., p. 1.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., p. 51.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., p. 52.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., p. 58.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., pp. 100–1.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., pp. 153, 172, 173.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., p. 40.

  82. 82.

    Ibid., p. 57.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., p. 56.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., p. 77.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., p. 86. The line was written not by Luo and Yang but by a ghostwriter: see Li, ‘How to Tell’, p. 49.

  86. 86.

    Lo and Yang, Red Crag, p. 107.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., p. 107.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., p. 176.

  89. 89.

    Ibid., p. 179.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., p. 185.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., p. 185.

  92. 92.

    See ibid., pp. 126, 488–93.

  93. 93.

    See ibid., pp. 370–92.

  94. 94.

    Ibid., p. 597.

  95. 95.

    Ibid., p. 606.

  96. 96.

    See He, ‘Coming of Age’, pp. 406–8.

  97. 97.

    Yu Hongmei, ‘Jiedu women shidaide jingshen zhenghou—dui dianshi lianxuju “Gangtie shi zenyang lianchengde” jieshou fankui de sikao’, in Dai Jinhua, ed., Shuxie Wenhua Yingxiong—Shijizhijiao de Wenhuayanjiu (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin wenhua chubanshe, 2000), pp. 216–19.

  98. 98.

    Eberlein, ‘Another Kind of American History in Chongqing, 2: Evolution’, The Atlantic, 1 February 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/02/another-kind-of-american-history-in-chongqing-2-evolution/70572/ (accessed 5 May 2019).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Thomas Lahusen

  2. California State University, Hayward, CA, USA

    Elizabeth McGuire

Authors
  1. Thomas Lahusen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Elizabeth McGuire
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Thomas Lahusen or Elizabeth McGuire .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Andrew Hammond

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Lahusen, T., McGuire, E. (2020). The Spread of Socialist Realism: Soviet and Chinese Developments. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_11

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation